launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> There have been a few things in the last day where people said (in
> bugs or mail) "I don't have permission to do X in Launchpad and I
> can't work out how to get it."
>
> In practice I guess they ask a Launchpad expert, so it's perhaps not
> the most urgent problem.
>
> However I was wondering if we could do something systematic that would
> fix this for many cases.  Launchpad has a systematic definition of
> security permissions.  As a thought experiment, suppose when a person
> doesn't have permission to use a particular control or page, we showed
> the repr of the security interface that controls it, rather than just
> hiding it.  Then if that said for instance
> "EditTeamByTeamOwnerOrTeamAdminsOrAdmins" (omg what a mouthful) it
> would at least give a clue, and that could eventually evolve to show
> you who the team owner and admins and system admins are, and how you
> might change this.  Perhaps this could visually just be a little lock
> with the tooltip showing the explanation.  Perhaps some discretion is
> needed to do this only on particularly relevant controls, not
> everything.
>
> What do you think?

I think that this is a good idea, that our permissions system needs
radical rethinking and that we shouldn't block the former on the
latter.

jml